Tomorrow Will Be Better, Part 2

Working With Edward Aswell and John Fischer

Edward Aswell was a different type of editor than Lawrence. He lunched with Smith at Giovanni's, without discussing the novel, and then sent her a letter full of abstract encouragements. He wasn't quite aware of how to handle Smith. In June he wrote a memo to his British publishers, who had been asking about the novel:

We have seen a first draft of the novel, but it called for extensive revision, and the author is now engaged in what amounts to practically a rewrite of the whole thing. She is extremely sensitive and emotional, and for that reason more than ordinarily difficult to handle. Neither she nor we know at this time how long it will take her to revise the book 1.

In leaving Lawrence, Smith abandoned editorial continuity. The next time Smith lunched with Aswell, he informed her that he was leaving Harper & Brothers, and her new editor would be a man named John Fischer.

As her new editor, Fischer's first move was to write Smith a letter asking her all the things that Smith had trained Lawrence not to ask: will she serialize, will she sell the radio rights, will she write for Cosmopolitan? Smith, at this point, wasn't writing much of anything--she was having a minor nervous breakdown. She wrote back:

I am going through a bad time and have the feeling that I can't write anything worth a damn . . . You must overlook it if I seem to be recalcitrant and belligerent or something. I was turned over to you at a somewhat jammed-up period in my life and I've gotten into a neurotic habit of lashing out at everyone and everything 2.

Nevertheless, Smith had gotten herself back to work on the novel, and the relationship with Fischer turned out to be a profitable one. He was able to help her with concrete suggestions for standard literary transitions and forms that she was then able to put into her slice-of-life, documentary-type narrative. He steered her toward a romantic conclusion, and she provided it, but she was not happy with it. The ending was key to the distribution of the novel. John Beecroft, the president of the Literary Guild, wrote with a suggestion that, if Smith would change the ending to leave more "hope for the future" they would accept it for their club. John Beecroft also wrote a letter to John Fischer that the "Implications of homosexuality are certain to offend a large number of readers. . ." 3 . Smith never changed those aspects of the novel and instead, the Book-of-the-Month Club took it.

Autobiography and Novels

In a way, Tomorrow Will Be Better and her next novel, Maggie-Now are as autobiographical as the A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Joy in the Morning: they are performance pieces incorporating elements of Smith's life. Smith avoiding using the people she knew and her own history, but she could not avoid using the feelings in her life, and memories. She created a passive character, Margy, who bears no resemblance to the lively Betty Smith, and put Margy in a relationship with a man who resembles Joe Jones. In that way, Smith put a puppet on the page and made it act out the angers, frustrations and memories that haunted her life. Then she put on a happy ending and title, and hoped for the best.

A major theme in Tomorrow Will Be Better is the effect of cruel and domineering mothers upon three characters -- Margy, Frankie, and Margy's Boss, Mr. Prentiss. Smith had had trouble with this mother figure all her life: she blamed the break-up of her first marriage on her mother-in-law, created a fight with Elizabeth Lawrence, and eventually blamed her second divorce on her mother-in-law as well. This was part of the emotional ground that Smith was covering in Tomorrow Will Be Better. She was also writing about a personal sense of inner despair. Although the title is hopeful, Smith's original inspiration was the Hardy poem that Smith had paraphrased to Lawrence, "the temporary is the all" 4. Hardy's poem begins:

Change and Chancefulness in my flowering youthtime,
Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;
Wrought us fellowlike, and despite divergence,
Fused us in friendship.

`Cherish him can I while the true one forthcome -
Come the rich fulfiller of my prevision;
Life is roomy yet, and the odds unbounded.'
So self-communed I.

Smith had Joe Jones in mind when this poem appealed to her: she had married him without knowing him, on the rebound of her love affair with Bob Finch, and on the eve of her fame. For the next five years, while she was writing Tomorrow Will Be Better, she was trying to come to terms with this marriage.

There are several other themes in Tomorrow Will Be Better. The novel is about the limited options available to working class people, but it is also about the roots of abuse and how abuse is perpetuated in and by a culture. It is about the roots of homosexuality as understood in the 1940s and the effect that three similar mothers have on their children. Altogether, it provides a rich and detailed image of the lives of working-class women that had not been previously portrayed in American literature.

The Plot of Tomorrow Will Be Better

We meet the 17-year old Margy in a recurring nightmare in which she is abandoned by her mother as a child. She finds herself in terror, on a dead?end street with huge iron gates blocking the end. This is the ruling metaphor of Tomorrow Will Be Better; just as Margy is trapped in her box, so are her parents. They eat same fried eggs and onions for dinner night after night, and have the same fights, night after night: Margy's father thought: "In his dim fumbling way, he had long ago decided that quarreling took the place of lovemaking as far as Flo was concerned" (30). Both parents, like Margy, are locked in a reoccurring nightmare of pain.

Margy's dream is based in fact: her mother let go of her hand in a strange neighborhood one day, and walked rapidly on without her. Smith explains that Flo did not dislike her daughter:

If the vein of essential truth in her could have been blasted free from its flinty layers of worry, bitterness and inarticulateness, her love for the child would have been revealed. She nagged and fretted at her because the child was her only emotional outlet; was someone to receive her voice; a symbol at which to direct thoughts spoken aloud. There was no one who listened so obligingly, who tried so hard to understand. (8)

Margy gets lost, experiences territorial hostility from other children playing on their blocks, and is almost trampled underfoot by a brewery truck. Finally, a kindly prostitute buys her an ice-cream cone and takes her home. Flo finds Margy sitting on the steps of her building eating an ice-cream cone and beats her:

"I'll learn you to scare the life out of me!" screamed Flo.

She slapped the ice cream out of the child's hand. It fell into the gutter. She slapped Margy first on one cheek and as the child swayed, on the other cheek to counteract the sway. She kept slapping back and forth and the child rocked from side to side like a last-standing bowling pin that is reluctant to fall. (22)

The physical abuse ends with this scene, but the psychological abuse does not. Margy tries to tell her father that she was lost, but Flo denies that it happened.

At sixteen Margy quits school and makes her first tentative steps towards independence by entering the world of labor. As a mail?order correspondent at Thomson-Jonson Mail Order House, Margy enjoys her work more than any other part of her life. But her incipient independence is diminished by the fact that she hands over ten of her twelve-dollar salary to her mother. She is ashamed of her poor clothes among the other women. Her friend Reenie encourages her to buy a warm winter coat, but her mother will not allow it. Margy is still trapped in the family routine of poverty and abuse.

The little bit of romance in Tomorrow Will Be Better takes place in the office, too. Mr. Prentiss, the boss of all the women workers, has a soft spot for Margy, but he is ruled by his mother who has kept him single into his forties and who still needs him to put her to sleep every night. She refers to her son as "her best beau" and, in bed one night, he whispers fiercely "I hate you mother" (155).

Marriage and Homosexuality

Margy gambles for a fuller freedom by marrying Frankie, a man with whom she is not in love. What they share is that "Both dreaded the plunge into turbulent family life after an orderly day at the office" (87) and both want escape from their families. Flo is angry at the thought of her daughter marrying and leaving home, and she verbally abuses her; Mrs. Malone, Frankie's mother, is rude and possessive, as if she owned her son, and verbally abuses Margy, too. Even though both sets of parents try to destroy the marriage, Frankie and Margy marry and set up housekeeping on a limited budget in a one-room apartment.

In keeping with the customs of the time, Margy quits her job for a life of isolation as a housekeeper trying to please a man who she barely knows. Even though she has escaped her mother, it is a hollow victory because Frankie does not love her; every time she touches him, he shrinks away. Frankie's conduct is inexplicable until he invites two friends home from the office with him. Both are characterized as gay: the woman "wore a severely plain tweed suit, low-heeled brogues and her stiff, straight hair was cut short"; the man "was good-looking, or would be, thought Margy, if he'd get that wavy blond hair of his cut a little shorter" (209). Margy is surprised to see a different side of Frankie when he is with his co-workers--he is "free and expansive," and, after their visit, he has sex with Margy for the first time. This is how Margy conceives a child.

When Margy tells Frankie she is pregnant, there is a "sudden look of revulsion and terror in his face" (213). Margy decides that the baby must be a girl because if she had a son she knew she would look for the affection from him that she was not getting from her husband and that her relationship to him would turn into the same relationship Mrs. Malone has with Frankie and Mrs. Prentiss with her boss. The child, a girl, is born dead.

After the baby's death, Margy finds the strength to tell off her mother and her mother-in-law. The crisis situation has woken her up from her sleepwalk through life. In a near-crazy, semi-suicidal state herself, she no longer cares what she says to people. She explains it to her mother:

"You see, I wanted this baby so bad. I needed it to prove something; to prove that this could be a good world. I was going to get all the things I never had for this baby to prove that there are more than dreams in a person's life. First, I was going to give it love.

"Ever since I was a child no one ever held me and said `I love you Margy.'"(250)

Her anger at her mother-in-law was more direct and forceful. To her, Margy says "I hate you!" (253). This is the same thought that Mr. Prentiss spoke into his pillow.

When Margy wants to return to work to help pay the hospital and funeral bills, Frankie objects, because, as he explains, he wants a wife to support so that he can prove that he was just like any other man. Margy wakes up after another loveless night, takes pen in hand, and . . . writes to her boss. This is the happy ending that Smith provided, the hope for tomorrow: it is suggested that she will get her job back and perhaps begin a romance with him. However, the reader is left with the feeling that Smith had: "that Prentiss might be Frankie again but on a higher plane and that Margy's implied marriage to him might be as unsatisfactory as her one to Frankie" 5.

Even though this ending did not make natural sense, it did make sense in terms of the reigning ideology of genre:

Even for women's experiential narratives, the initial process of emplotment, then, often becomes an imposition of the culture's dominant expectations for women's lives; their stories become an enactment of what White calls the iconic function of culturally available plot structures, "one of the ways that a culture has of making sense of both personal and public pasts" (Frye 39).

As with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith had to provide an ending that would fit within the structure of the romantic novel so that it could be sold to readers with the expectation of a positive conclusion. It is likely Smith was deeply influenced by the work of James T. Farrell as well. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy is nearly as bleak and optionless as this novel. It has the same somber social-realism that does not hesitate to flood the reader with the details of failed lives. And, she was probably still writing within the tradition of the theater that had produced such family dramas as Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Tomorrow Will Be Better is a hybrid of all of these forms, and it is a complex novel to understand.

Publication of Tomorrow Will Be Better

Tomorrow Will Be Better was published on the fifth anniversary of the publication of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, August 18th, 1948. It had the largest pre-publication printing in the history of the Harper fiction department--100,000 copies 6. Smith was on the cover of Publisher's Weekly, which ran a story that Harper was spending $20,000 in advertising, giving every imaginable selling help for dealers, advertising geared to reach the three million purchasers of A Tree 7. Despite its painful mixed message, Tomorrow Will Be Better rose to the bestseller list, and was the fourth best-selling novel of 1948 (Strauss 250). Smith was still riding on the crest of popularity from the publication of her first novel. In this way, Smith's success contributed to her gradual critical decline: the readers of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn were all expecting a novel equal in power to the first.

The Critics

The great expectations for Smith's second novel biased the reception so that it was difficult for critics to give a realistic assessment of the novel. In the Book of the Month Club circular, Dorothy Canfield stated that she considered it "even better than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and Henry Seidel Canby agreed, adding "It's definitely better, as lasting literature." Canby was interested in the novel as a peek at the lives of working-class women who ride the subway to Brooklyn:

Tomorrow Will Be Better is about office jobs, and mothers, and marriages. If you think an office is a dull, mechanical place, it is because you have had no Betty Smith to take you on the inside and see and feel the complex of jealousies, affections, ambitions, that make it warm with emotion. To the young girl trying to escape from a too often quarreling family in a dingy, discouraged flat, the office is the first step toward the American Dream with her parents have failed to realize 8.

But no amount of pre-publication advertising could make Tomorrow Will Be Better a happier novel, and no amount of positive assessment could make the public or the reviewers like it. Tomorrow Will Be Better was essentially about the theme of abuse in dysfunctional families, even though it was masked by the form of a romance, and that theme was not au courant.

On August 22nd, the reviews appeared. The New York Herald wrote: "What emerges from [this novel] is something we have always known: the poor make a wound in every society. Miss Smith as artist rubs salt on the edges of the open flesh." The New York Times wrote: "The book makes no suggestions, answers no question, proposes no solutions." Walter Spearman, Smith's associate in the Carolina Playmakers, wrote in the Durham Herald "there is a deep-seated pessimism and bitterness that permeates the book." Perhaps the best critical summary of Tomorrow Will Be Better was that of Lewis Gannett, who wrote: "Betty Smith's first novel was about a tree that grew, lush and beautiful, out of the cement of a Brooklyn back yard. Her second novel is about weeds that grow between the cracks in Brooklyn sidewalks and shrivel in the dust" 9. Eventually the reviews started playing on the popularity of the former title: "Hope, Punched in Nose, Still Grows in Brooklyn," "Miss Smith's Tree Dies in Brooklyn," "A Stunted Tree Grows in Brooklyn," and "Futility Rules."

Somehow Smith managed to keep her sense of humor. Harriet Van Horne, in the New York World Telegram, wrote an account of a television show, "The Author Meets the Critics," on which she appeared:

A disdainful man who spoke in highly cultured accents, Mr. Paulding had only contempt for Miss Smith's people. "Why must everybody in the book have such a terrible mother?" he kept asking. He said he felt sure Miss Smith had never actually studied psychology or psychiatry. That she'd simply accepted "notes brought to her by some pimply faced youth."

Miss Smith, when called upon to defend her book, was altogether too humble. I had hoped to see her Irish temper rise a bit. "I've never studied psychology," she said. "But I know my own kind of people. I'm writing of a world I know because I lived in it. The conversations in the book are conversations I have heard. That's the way things are in Brooklyn."

As to Mr. Paulding's distaste for the possessive, spoiled Mrs. Prentiss, Miss Smith let go her only arrow for the evening. "Perhaps Mr. Paulding knows a woman of that sort," she hazarded. Then, as if contrite for venturing so far into the life of a stranger, she added, "Forgive me for being a third rate psychologist."

Overall, Smith didn't care too much that her second novel was not a success. She was far too busy for one, and I think she understood that she was writing in an impossible situation.

The Other Ending

Smith provided a secondary conclusion for Tomorrow Will Be Better. It resolves Margy's recurrent dream: "a change came and she was no longer a child. She was a woman. She pushed the gates open and walked through. The way ahead was known to her. She would never be lost again" (274). Neither ending is convincing, but it is interesting to wonder how Smith would have developed this theme further if she had had the confidence to title her novel after the Hardy poem and center her dramatic situation in a character living a life without love: imagine a novel about physical and psychological abuse in the late 1940s, when the men had returned from the war and the media was busy building an ideology that idealized the nuclear family, the housekeeper, the breadwinner and the American Dream. The Temporary and the All would never have been published.

Endnotes

1. Edward Aswell, letter to Miss Fiske, 19 June 1947.

2. Betty Smith, letter to John Fischer, 12 Sept. 1947.

3. John Beecroft, letter to John Fischer, 8 March 1948.

4. Betty Smith, letter to Elizabeth Lawrence, 4 Jan. 1944.

5. Betty Smith, letter to John Fischer, 25 Feb. 1948.

6. Bronx Home News 16 May 1948.

7. Publishers Weekly, 17 July 1948.

8. Newsletter, Book of the Month Club, July 1948.

9. Lewis Gannett, New York Herald Tribune, 18 Aug. 1948.